My last 2014 Highlights update posted on 1.3. This morning I reviewed Hitfix’s “Most Anticipated Prestige Films of 2014” piece (which I avoided because it’s one of those photo cavalcade page-view pieces) and have added 9 of their picks along with 4 wait-and-see maybes. So my previous total of 46 is now 55 or 59 with the maybes. I wasn’t sure about 2014 before — now I’m thinking it might be another banner year.

The Hitfix additions in order of presumed quality: Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood, Noah Baumbach‘s Untitled Public School Project, Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special, Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins (a 2014 Sundance selection), Hossein Amini‘s The Two Faces of January, Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth, Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater, Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, Todd Haynes‘ Carol.

Probationary/Concerned/Lack of Trust/Wait-and-See: David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups (IF it even comes out this year — you know Malick). Ryan Gosling‘s How To Catch A Monster (judgment in question after The Place Beyond The Pines, Only God Forgives), Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far From The Madding Crowd.

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Last night the legendary Forest Whitaker was presented with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s 8th annual Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence. The idea was to raise money and to push Whitaker’s Butler performance as Best Actor-worthy. An Oscar nomination seems like a safe bet, no? The event was posh, man. Tuxedos and gowns and waiters and black-suited goons with their arms folded behind them. It happened at Goleta’s Bacara Resort, which has never been easy to find without GPS. I was there along with Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley (accompanied by his wife April).

One of several underwhelming photos I took last night — (l. to r.) Forrest Whitaker, Angela Basset, Michael Jordan.

Forrest Whitaker and wife Keisha Nash prior to last night’s ballroom event at Goleta’s Bacara Resort.

Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan, Santa Barbara Film festival director Roger Durling.

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Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has landed Wolf of Wall Street‘s Martin Scorsese for a nice webcam chat — nothing crazy, loose and easy but, as always with Scorsese, nothing but the truth. How can you not love this guy? At 71, Scorsese is probably as alive and hungry and ready to roll as he ever was, and perhaps a bit more so in the heat of the Wolf “controversy.” I hate using that word in general (it sounds like a local TV news term) but especially in this context. When an angry debate is due to a vocal minority either unable or unwilling to get where a film is coming from, it’s not controversial — it’s perceptional or remedial.

Thanks to the gracious Steven Gaydos for ushering me into today’s Variety brunch (11 am to 12:45 pm) at the Parker Palm Springs. Tasty omelettes, fresh fruit, good coffee, agreeable sunshine. The main honorees were Wolf of Wall Street costar Jonah Hill (introduced by Hill’s Cyrus costar Marisa Tomei) and Saving Mr. Banks director John Lee Hancock (introduced by Colin Farrell). Among the ten upcoming directors honored were Ben Falcone (the upcoming Tammy which stars his wife Melissa McCarthy) and Belle helmer Ama Asante.

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Around 6:30 pm I drove over to the Rennaissance hotel to pick up my Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival press pass. I didn’t want to park in their main lot because they slap you with a $12 parking fee if you stay more than 30 minutes so I parked at some little office building next door and then climbed through some bushes to get to the Rennaissance. I got the pass, came back out and went back into the bushes again. Except I came out at a different area and had to stumble over a dirt patch and around a wall to get to the parking area. But I didn’t see that a curb with a steep drop was just beyond the wall, and so I went tumbling and crashing down upon the hard rocky pavement. No broken camera or torn jacket, but I bruised my right elbow, bloodied my right hand (vino dripping on the iPhone 5), slightly bruised my right hip and banged my left knee. I should have used the flashlight app on the phone. My fault, not the curb’s.

An hour from now I’ll be attending a nice, civilized Variety brunch at the Parker Palm Springs, and then I’ll be driving all the way back to Los Angeles and then up to Santa Barbara (at least a four-hour drive) for tonight’s Forrest Whitaker tribute at the Bacara Resort and Spa, which is actually in Goleta so make it four and half hours. I might have to crash up there. I’m going to be whipped by 10 pm or whenever the Whitaker thing ends.

I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival.

It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise.

Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.

Omar costars Waleed_Zuaiter (l.) and Adam Bakri (r.) following last night’s screening at Palm Spring Int’l Film Festival

I’m a serious admirer of the two leads, Adam Bakri, who plays the titular character, a Palestinian youth whose decision to take part in an assassination with two friends seals his fare, and Waleed Zuaiter, an Israeli agent who presses Omar into his service as an informer.

Bakri and Zuaiter did a q & an after last night’s screening.

Bakri, probably 21 or 22, is making his feature film debut with Omar. He’s currently living stateside (either LA or NY). He was wearing a really handsome military-styled dark blue jacket, and so I asked him where he got it. Zara at the Grove, he said, so maybe he’s living here.

From Jay Weissberg‘s Variety review, filed during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival: “As he did with Paradise Now, Abu-Assad refuses to demonize characters for their poor choices. Only too aware of the crushing toll of the Occupation on Palestinians, he shows men (the film is male-centric) making tragic, often self-destructive decisions as a result of an inescapable environment of degradation and violence.

“With Omar he’s finessed the profile, depicting how the weaknesses that make us human, especially love, can lead, in such a place, to acts of betrayal. It’s as if he’s taken thematic elements from Westerns and film noir, using the fight for dignity and an atmosphere of doubt to explain rather than excuse heinous actions. Viewers with a firm moral compass, who see killing as an act always to be condemned, won’t need Omar to tell them what’s right and wrong.”

Ten years ago the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival was a respected, smartly-programmed venue for foreign films with a few celebrities and photos ops on the side. Now it’s a star-studded, rock-your-paparazzi, award-season megashow with A-class celebs, limos, security goons and guys like me taking pictures and…uhm, oh yeah, right, a smartly-programmed venue for foreign film on the side.

August: Osage County‘s Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep prior to last night’s Palm Springs Film Festival gala award ceremony. I only attended the after-party. Pic is totally stolen from JustJared.com.

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Notice how Today correspondent Gael Fashingbauer Cooper stealthily avoided dicey or inflammatory allusions in her 1.4 piece about insensitive people ruining movies for others in theatres due to talking, texting, bringing babies, etc. This is how it’s done if you want to avoid land mines. Old ladies, babies, texters, etc. Those darn rude people!

The National Society of Film critics has given its Best Picture prize to Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis — the second reputable group (after the Toronto Film Critics Association) to see through the melancholia and stand up for this brilliantly sardonic mood-trip whatever. At the same time the NSFC blew off Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street in all categories. A little too radical, guys? Pushes things too far, not enough punishment for Belfort, etc.?

The Coens also won for Best Director, beating out Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron and 12 Years A Slave‘s Steve McQueen. Inside Llewyn Davis‘s Oscar Isaac won for Best Actor (Ejiofor and Redford were top runners-ups) and Blue Jasmine‘s Cate Blanchett won for Best Actress. To the NSFC’s credit, Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos was the first runner-up to Blanchett.

They gave their Best Suppporting Actor prize to Spring Breakers‘ James Franco…the fuck? More so than Dallas Buyers Club‘s Jared Leto and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Jonah Hill?

This Franco crap has gone far enough, all right? He played that part with his gold teeth and his corn rows and his pumped-up muscles and “mah sheeyit.” Not once did I say as I watched Spring Breakers, “Wow, Franco’s really nailing it here”…not once!

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Sent this morning — two previous requests have been sent over the last week or so: “Please consider chatting with me briefly about The Wolf of Wall Street, Oliver. Your Wall Street perspective alone demands…er, requires this. In a sense you and Gordon Gekko/Michael Douglas fathered Jordan Belfort — he was one of those “greedy little shits” of the late ’80s who got into stockbroking partly because Gekko’s swagger and “greed is good” speech turned him on. C’mon, man — you created him. In a certain sense, I mean. Henry Frankenstein didn’t mean to create Boris Karloff‘s “monster” either, but that’s what happened.

“I also need you to address the view that The Wolf of Wall Street is the new Scarface. (I riffed on this on 12.13). Like Scarface was in ’83, Wolf has been decried by older conservatives, slow-on-the-pickup critics, industry lightweights and in some cases women. Wolf‘s crime, they feel, has been its failure to deliver sufficient payback to Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Belfort, for seeming to enjoy the amorality of its lead characters at the expense of some moral scheme. Or for being too long or too excessive in its portrayal of Belfort’s wild-ass shenanigans. Over-the-top excess is very clearly the point, of course.

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I saw Stuart Rosenberg‘s The Laughing Policeman (’73) in two shifts last night. I bought the DVD at Amoeba earlier in the evening for only $5. I came back, watched the HBO Herblock doc (not bad, good enough, fine) and then popped in the Policeman DVD around 9:30 or so and started to watch. Within 15 or 20 minutes I was out. I woke up a little later, went to bed, couldn’t sleep, got up and watched the Rosenberg again. It’s a character-and-atmosphere film first and a big-city whodunit second. (Or third.) The plot doesn’t add up but it’s a fairly decent film. Realistic mid-range policiers with movie stars haven’t exactly disappeared but when was the last good one? Bruce Dern played his usual grinning or glaring eccentric — half-weird, half-cagey. Either you got Dern or you didn’t. Dern’s detective to an angry back guy in Mission district: “What are you gonna do, eyeball me to death?”

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